up to the top of the winches, before being swung back on to the top of the caravan vehicle. Crozet’s tiny-looking vehicle bobbed and yawed alongside the caravan for several hundred metres, then allowed itself to be slowly overtaken by the rumbling procession. Rashmika watched until it was lost to view behind the grinding wheels of one of the machines.
She stepped back from the inclined viewing window. That was it, then: all her bridges burned. But her resolve to continue remained as strong as ever. She was going onwards, no matter what it took.
‘I see you’ve made your mind up, then.’
Rashmika turned from the window. The sound of Quaestor Jones’s voice shocked her: she had imagined herself alone.
The quaestor’s green pet cleaned its face with its one good forelimb, its tail wrapped tight as a tourniquet around his upper arm.
‘My mind didn’t need making up,’ she said.
‘I had hoped that the letter from your brother would knock some sense into your head. But it didn’t, and here you are. At least now we have a small treat for you.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Rashmika asked.
‘There’s been a slight change in our itinerary,’ he said. ‘We’ll be taking a little longer to make our rendezvous with the cathedrals than planned.’
‘Nothing serious has happened, I hope.’
‘We’ve already incurred delays that we can’t make up by following our usual route south. We had intended to traverse the Ginnungagap Rift near Gudbrand Crossing, then move south down the Hyrrokkin Trail until we reached the Way, where we’d meet the cathedrals. But that simply isn’t possible now, and in any case, there’s been a major icefall somewhere along the Hyrrokkin Pass. We don’t have the gear to shift it, not quickly, and the nearest caravan with ice-clearing equipment is stuck at Glum Junction, pinned down by a flash glacier. So we’ll have to take a short cut, if we aren’t to be even later.’
‘A short cut, Quaestor?’
‘We’re approaching the Ginnungagap Rift.’ He paused. ‘You know about the rift, of course. Everything has to cross it at some point.’
Rashmika visualised the laceration of the Rift, a deep sheer-sided ice canyon slicing diagonally across the equator. It was the largest geological feature on the planet, the first thing Quaiche had named on his approach.
‘I thought there was only one safe crossing,’ she said.
‘For the cathedrals, yes,’ he allowed. ‘The Way deviates a little to the north, where the walls of the Rift have been tiered in a zigzag fashion to allow the cathedrals to descend to the floor. It’s a laborious process, costs them days, and then they have to repeat the process climbing up the far side. They need a good head start on Haldora if they aren’t to slip behind. They call that route the Devil’s Staircase, and every cathedral master secretly dreads it. The descent is narrow and collapses aren’t uncommon. But
‘You’re talking about the bridge,’ Rashmika said, with a shiver of fear and anticipation.
‘You’ve seen it, then.’
‘Only in photos.’
‘What did you think?’
‘I think it looks beautiful,’ she said, ‘beautiful and delicate, like something blown from glass. Much too delicate for machines.’
‘We’ve crossed it before.’
‘But no one knows how much it can take.’
‘I think we can trust the scuttlers in that regard, wouldn’t you say? The experts say it’s been there for millions of years.’
‘They say a lot of things,’ Rashmika replied, ‘but we don’t know for sure how old it is, or who built it. It doesn’t look much like anything else the scuttlers left behind, does it? And we certainly don’t know that it was ever meant to be crossed.’
‘You seem unnaturally worried about what is — in all honesty — a technically simple manoeuvre, one that will save us many precious days. Might I ask why?’
‘Because I know what they call that crossing,’ she said. ‘Ginnungagap Rift is what Quaiche named the canyon, but they have another name for it, don’t they? Especially those who decide to cross the bridge. They call it Absolution Gap. They say you’d better be free from sin before you begin the crossing.’
‘But of course, you don’t believe in the existence of sin, do you?’
‘I believe in the existence of reckless stupidity,’ Rashmika replied.
‘Well, you needn’t worry yourself about that. All you have to do is enjoy the view, just like the other pilgrims.’
‘I’m no pilgrim,’ she said.
The quaestor smiled and popped something into his pet’s mouth. ‘We’re all either pilgrims or martyrs. In my experience, it’s better to be a pilgrim.’
Antoinette put on the goggles. The view through them was like a smoky counterpart of the real room, with red Canasian numerals tumbling in her right visual field. For a moment nothing else changed. The haphazard skeletal machine — the class-three apparition — continued to stand amid the discarded slurry of junk from which it had been birthed, one limb frozen in the act of tossing her the goggles.
‘Captain…’ she began.
But even as she spoke the apparition and its detritus were merging into the background, losing sharpness and contrast against the general clutter of the chamber. The goggles were not working perfectly, and in one square part of her visual field the skeletal machine remained unedited, but elsewhere it was vanishing like buildings into a wall of sea fog.
Antoinette did not like this. The machinery had not threatened her, but it troubled her not to have a good idea of where it was. She was reaching up for the goggles, ready to slip them off, when a voice buzzed in her ear.
‘Don’t. Keep them on. You need them to see me.’
‘Captain?’
‘I promise I won’t hurt you. Look.’
She looked. Something was emerging now, being slowly edited into her visual field. A human figure — utterly real, this time — was forming out of thin air. Antoinette took an involuntary step backwards, catching her torch against an obstruction and dropping it to the floor.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he told her. ‘This is what you came for, isn’t it?’
‘Right now I’m not sure,’ she breathed.
The human figure had stepped out of history. He wore a truly ancient space suit, a baggy, bulging affair of crinkled rust-orange fabric. His boots and thick-fingered gloves were clad in the same tawny material, ripped here and there to reveal a laminated mesh of underlying layers. He wore a dull silver belt festooned with numerous tools of unclear function. A rugged square box hung on the chest region of his suit, studded with chunky plastic-sealed controls large enough to be worked despite the handicap of the gloves. An even larger box sat on his back, rising above his neck. Moulded from bright red plastic, a thick ribbed hose dangled from the backpack over his left shoulder, its open end resting against the upper shelf of the chest-pack. The silver band of the suit’s neck ring was a complexity of locking mechanisms and black rubberised seals. Between the neck ring and the upper part of the suit were many unrecognisable logos and insignia.
He wore no helmet.
The Captain’s face looked too small for the suit. On his scalp — which appeared shaven — he wore a padded black and white cap veined with monitor wires. In the smoky light of the goggles she couldn’t guess at the shade of his skin. It was smooth, stretched tight over his cheekbones, shadowed with a week’s growth of patchy black beard. He had very fine razor-cut eyebrows, which arched quizzically above wide-set, doglike eyes. She could see the whites of those eyes between the pupil and the lower eyelid. He had the kind of mouth — thin, straight, perfect
